Religion

What image comes to mind when you hear the word success? A blue-suited CEO? Internet billionaire Mark Zuckerberg? Perhaps Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela? But if you’re like me, you probably didn’t think of a person living an unglamorous, day-to-day, ordinary life.

During the COVID-19 lockdown last year, I lived with some messy people. I’d moved into a house that I shared with a wonderful couple of brothers. They were almost everything you could ask for in a set of housemates. Friendly, funny, respectful of your privacy . . . genuinely great people in almost every respect.

It is no coincidence that the first Baptist church in the United States, the first synagogue, and the first Quaker assembly house are all located in the small American state of Rhode Island. Their existence is due to the influence of Roger Williams, who resolutely upheld the principle of freedom of conscience more than 100 years before it was invoked in the First...

''The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, 'You have plenty of grain...

"Where is God?" is the question that arises in the face of inexplicable tragedy. When even a high-ranking clergyman is plagued by this question, the natural response is to conclude that something does not add up.

When a visitor walks into your church, what will they see? What will they hear? How will they feel?

Taken as a whole, this question sounds like a painful cry, springing forth from the depths of the human being, in the midst of the darkness of uncertainty and doubt. This question, however, consists of multiple sub-questions. We will address these essential questions that will open our minds to the light of the teachings of Him who holds all knowledge and truth.

In the first part of this series, we familiarised ourselves with the classical Protestant perception of the concept and prophetic figure of the Antichrist, and evaluated the classical identification of the Antichrist with the papacy. Further analysis becomes even more intriguing with a close reading of the major biblical prophecies about the Antichrist.

Christmas involves a financial and, at the same time, an emotional expense. Even in times of crisis, the spending season lasts longer than the holiday itself.

Putting Christmas on the myth-busting agenda is both an uncomfortable and challenging task—gratuitous sacrilege and pure paganism for those who believe that questioning Christmas is a sign of atheistic or conspiratorial leanings; honest, necessary Christian analysis for those interested in eliminating forgeries and freeing themselves from prejudice.

I was descending from Omu Peak, in the Bucegi Mountains, with a few dozen young people. It had not been an ideal hike, and we were behind schedule. The forest made the darkness even thicker as it began to cover the mountain, and slowly, our minds as well.

Let's go back in time to the day when Jesus spoke His apocalyptic words. At that time, rather than giving a revelation about the future, He was more concerned with warning about the dangers of deception.

With Jesus, it was always different. For most of my life, I could only see God the Father through a legalistic filter. But with Jesus, it was always different.

The “poor of Christ”, the “poor of Lyon” or, simply, the “brothers” never called themselves “Waldenses” until they joined the Reformation. The derisive appellative was given to them by their persecutors, after the name of the man who consolidated the doctrine of the community.

The book of the Acts of the Apostles presents an encounter, supernaturally mediated by God, between Philip, one of the seven deacons, and an Ethiopian dignitary. When the Christian missionary met him, the Ethiopian eunuch was reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah, one of the many Messianic prophecies, and asked Philip a question we often ignore: “Tell me, please, who is...